"We Don't Normally Cover Suicides, but We'll Make an Exception..."

Due to golf practice, I missed the evening news, so I ended up watching the 11 o'clock news. I must say that I was surprised by how much news they actually had tonight. The first conversation (between Wendy Bell and the weather guy--forgot his name) didn't happen until close to 20 minutes into the broadcast. However, the thing that REALLY surprised me, was the coverage of Carnegie Mellon University tonight. After explaining that WTAE does not normally cover suicides, Bell proceeded to correspond with a reporter on scene at Carnegie, where a 19 year old student was found dead in a stairwell. Not only did WTAE cover this news story, they interviewed several students--something I found to be rather uncomfortable. I could understand interviewing these students down the road, but immediately after the accident was kind of distasteful--especially because Carnegie Mellon refused to make a comment. What really bugged me, was that instead of moving onto new news, Bell began to talk about all the other issues CMU has been dealing with in the last week, but none of this information was related to the suicide on campus. They then discussed untreated depression, even though it really isn't news.

I feel like Bell said "we don't normally cover suicides" just to draw the viewers in. Like, "Ooooh, they're doing something off the wall for once! They're branching out!"

I also noticed that most of the sources used in their news briefs were either neighbors or parents, or even policemen.

It appears that sports news was the most important information of the night, because the news station waited until almost 11:30 to talk about the Steelers, even though they previewed the news several times. Newscasters spent time discussing the pirates before leading into more weather forecasting. It makes me think they ran out of information, because they showed the weather twice.

I was honestly surprised by how much news was provided in this episode of the news. It was a lot more than I expected. Nevertheless, they still spent a lot of time relaying information that could easily be found on the internet (such as suicide being the second leading cause of death for college students).